On Going Viral

Errors and Omissions from My Most Popular Video

Jun 07, 2023

It’s been a while since I posted anything here on Too Much Film School, and if you’re a regular subscriber, I figure I owe you an explanation.

If you’re just coming from the TMFS YouTube channel about the corrections on my Academy Award video, you can probably skip the next two sections.

Where I’ve Been

To be completely honest, the main reason I haven’t written anything or posted a new video is because my video essay about the first Academy Awards kinda sorta went viral. Not mainstream viral or anything, but at over 100,000 views, it’s the most viewed thing I’ve ever made, other than a short horror movie that took off for some reason when I wasn’t paying attention—

But YouTube doesn’t care about views alone; it’s all about watch time and subscribers. “A Final Girl’s Best Friend” is less than 2 minutes long, so even with a decent average-view-percentage, it didn’t garner much watch time.

“The Best Picture Winner the Academy Doesn't Want You to Know About,” on the other hand, is nine minutes long, and accumulated 7 times Final Girl’s total watch time. Plus, it attracted over a thousand new subscribers to the Too Much Film School channel.

Between those two factors, TMFS became monetized because of that one, single video!

After months of experimenting with different types of videos, I felt like I had finally cracked this film commentary thing. Then I posted my Aladdin video and it did… fine. The second most successful video on the channel, even, with over 6,000 views and 600 hours of watch time. That would’ve excited me just a few weeks before, but coming down several orders of magnitude was frustrating.

My next video had to be good. It had to be well-written, well-edited, adequately voiced.1 I kept getting hung up on details and minutiae, and not just finishing the darn thing. I’d done it before, so why couldn’t I do it again? I got stuck.

They say it takes three weeks to form a habit,2 and I guess I made a habit of not writing TMFS.

Just Post It

Then, my buddy Josh over at

The Hourly Struggle

went and made a video about The Little Mermaid remake—

He had shown me an early cut and asked for input. After some discussion and further edits, I suggested that he stop fiddling with it, before it gets out of date. “Just post what you have and make the next one better!” I said.

That’s when I realized…

I’ve managed to maintain my daily writing habit at

The Amateur Theologian

, which I’m proud of. But I can make Too Much Film School videos, too. So keep an eye out, you’ll be seeing more, soon.

Corrections on “The Secret Best Picture Winner”

Ironically, despite all my talk about my painstaking research above, I made two clear and unambiguous factual errors in my Best Picture video essay.

The first was strongly implying3 that one of the directors of Everything Everywhere All at Once was foreign born. I was reaching for parallels between the 1927 and 2022 Academy Awards. Several people commented on this and tried to ascribe nefarious motives to the mistake, but really, it just came from quickly skimming articles that focused on the “immigrant experience” of EEAAO and then not checking further. The directors are, however, the child and grandchild of immigrants.

So, I was a little off.

Second, I said that Wings was the most expensive silent film ever made. I meant to say “one of the most expensive…” That’s even what I had in my script. I genuinely didn’t even notice I changed the wording. Most sources say the 1925 version of Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ is the most expensive silent.

A Blanket Response to the Comments

Any video with 100,000 views is going to get a lot of comments. Many of them were thoughtful and interesting, spawning several side-conversations.

And then there were the comments that either completely misunderstood the video, or just took its contents personally. They fell into one of three categories:

“Well, I liked [whatever movie.]” Okay, that’s fine, but I didn’t make this video for you, specifically. Your personal taste isn’t relevant to this discussion. I never once said which movies I liked, either.
“I can’t believe you think [technically impressive movie] should’ve won Best Picture instead of [artistic achievement].” I’m literally advocating for two best pictures. There is no “instead.”
“I don’t think the Academy should give an Oscar to a film just for being popular.”

So, if you feel like saying some variation on the above three, don’t bother. I’ve already heard them.

But if you have something new and interesting to add, comment away!

Too Much Film School